There’s a phrase I keep hearing lately that I would love someone to define with considerably more specificity.

"On track."

People are on track with school, with their careers, in relationships. Back on track after apparently wandering away from it for a while.

I would just like to know where this track is, who built it, and why nobody thought to send me a map.

Because I’m young, about to finish college, and if you asked me what I’m doing with my life, I could technically give you a very respectable answer. I’m graduating, I want to go straight into an accelerated nursing program, and I’ve spent enough time comparing schools across the country that I could probably tell you more about prerequisite policies in cities I’ve never lived in than about several streets in my own neighborhood.

That sounds like someone with a plan.

Meanwhile, I currently have programs saved in Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Michigan, South Carolina, Mississippi and various other places I become emotionally attached to for forty eight hours after seeing one cute apartment online.

So perhaps “plan” is being used generously.

The strange thing about finishing college is that for most of your life, there has always been an obvious next thing. You finished one grade and went to the next one. You graduated high school and everybody spent months asking where you were going to college, but at least the available answers all belonged to the same general category.

Now people ask what I’m doing after graduation and suddenly they’re asking me to select an entire life. Where are you moving? Where are you applying? What kind of nursing do you want to do? Are you staying in California? Would you actually move across the country by yourself? Do you know anyone there?

No, Cheryl. That is why this is stressful.

I can tell you that I want to be a nurse. I can tell you that working with women and babies has always interested me. I can tell you I want to leave California for at least a while and find out what it feels like to build a life somewhere I didn’t grow up.

The issue is that once I say those things out loud, everyone understandably assumes the remainder of the document has been completed.

But it hasn't. There are blanks. Quite a few. Some have question marks. One may simply say “TBD.”

And lately I’ve been realizing that I’m not actually bothered by not knowing all of it until I start looking around and noticing people who seem like they do.

That’s where “on track” gets me.

Someone knows exactly where she’s moving after graduation. Someone already has a job lined up. Someone has been with the same person for years and their future seems to arrive preassembled. Someone is perfectly happy staying close to home. Someone else moved away and somehow, within a month, appears to have located her favorite coffee shop, Pilates studio, grocery store and future husband.

I’m very happy for them.

I would also like to speak to whoever handled onboarding.

Because my own life currently feels less like a straight line and more like seventeen browser tabs that are all technically related. One is nursing school. One is graduation. One is a city I’m considering moving to. One is tuition. One is whether I need another prerequisite. One is an apartment I have no business looking at yet. And one is probably something completely unrelated that I opened because concentrating for too long began to feel oppressive.

The funny part is that my day to day life already requires me to be fairly responsible.

I go to class. I work. I turn assignments in. I spend part of my week nannying, which means there are afternoons when I am helping a seventh grader understand geometry and then going home to learn about sensation, perception, healthcare systems, death and dying, social psychology and whatever else five college classes have collectively decided I should know that week.

Nothing makes you question the concept of adulthood quite like explaining an angle to a thirteen year old with complete authority and then opening your own laptop three hours later thinking, "what does this professor want from me?"

Apparently authority is situational.

And maybe that’s why this stage feels so weird. I’m old enough to make decisions that could completely change my life, but young enough that I still regularly encounter basic information nobody bothered to teach me.

There are forms I don’t understand. Insurance remains unnecessarily mysterious.

And yet there’s this subtle idea that by your early twenties, you should at least be beginning to look settled.

I don’t feel settled, I feel interested.

That’s different.

I’m interested in nursing. I’m interested in what it would be like to move somewhere that knows what a season is. I’m interested in seeing what happens if I stop automatically choosing the familiar option. I’m interested in the version of myself who has to make friends somewhere new instead of inheriting a social life from school.

None of that feels like confusion to me until I try to fit it into one clean answer.

I think we give an enormous amount of credit to certainty. Somebody says, “I’ve known since I was twelve,” and everybody is impressed.

Which is fair. Congratulations on the administrative efficiency. But I don’t know that knowing first means knowing best.

At eighteen I had ideas about what my life would look like that made complete sense to eighteen year old me. She had limited data. She had never taken half the classes I’ve taken now, met half the people I know now, lived through things that changed what I value, or spent hours researching accelerated nursing programs because she hadn’t even decided nursing was the direction yet.

It would actually be a little bizarre if I were still faithfully executing every decision she made.

I think that’s what I’m beginning to understand about changing your mind, sometimes it isn’t a failure to commit. Sometimes you simply received new information.

I used to think choosing a direction meant I should be able to picture the whole route. Now I’m much more interested in whether the next part makes sense.

Nursing makes sense to me. Graduating makes sense to me. Applying to programs outside California makes sense to me, even though the idea of actually packing my things and moving somewhere I barely know is both exactly what I want and objectively terrifying.

That contradiction used to bother me more. Now I think that might just be how you know something matters.

There are plenty of things I don’t care enough about to be scared of.

I also keep thinking about how different everybody’s twenties actually are once you stop viewing them as one giant category.

At twenty one, one person is still in school while another is working full time. Someone lives with her parents and is saving money. Someone has an apartment with a boyfriend. Someone is applying to medical school. Someone has absolutely no intention of going back to school ever again. Someone is thrilled to stay in the town she grew up in and another person spends half her free time searching “best places to live in your twenties.”

None of these people are late. They’re not even going to the same place.

So why do we keep acting like there should be checkpoints?

I think social media makes the problem worse because life looks especially organized when you only see the sentences with punctuation at the end.

Got the job.

Moved to the city.

Accepted.

Engaged.

There’s no standard announcement format for “I narrowed my list down from eleven options to seven and somehow feel less certain than I did before.”

Which is unfortunate, because I would like that post immediately.

Most of my life right now exists in that middle part. I know enough to be moving, but not enough to know exactly where I’m landing.

And I actually think that’s kind of exciting when I stop trying to make it sound more resolved than it is.

A year from now, my Mondays could look completely different. I could be walking into nursing classes in a state where I currently don’t know the roads. I could have friends I haven’t met yet. There could be a coffee shop I go to all the time that, as I’m writing this, I have never even seen.

That possibility is one of my favorite things about being this age.

It's also probably why I have difficulty answering questions about my five year plan without wanting to request a shorter time frame.

Five years is an unreasonable amount of confidence.

Ask me about spring.

I can work with spring.

I’m not saying I suddenly love uncertainty. I would still happily accept a detailed packet from the universe containing dates, locations, tuition estimates and a brief explanation of which decisions will eventually embarrass me.

I’m just becoming less convinced that not having that packet means I’m doing anything wrong.

Maybe being “on track” at twenty one isn’t supposed to look particularly impressive. Maybe it looks like going to class, going to work, submitting applications, changing your list, asking better questions than you did a year ago and slowly becoming someone whose choices make a little more sense to herself.

That sounds almost disappointingly normal.

Which is probably why nobody posts it.

I have no idea which nursing program I’ll end up at, where I’ll be living, what kind of nurse I’ll eventually become or whether the version of my future I’m picturing right now will survive contact with reality.

But I know I’m excited to find out.

And lately, I think I’d rather be genuinely curious about my own life than prematurely certain about it just so I can give people a better answer when they ask what’s next.

So if we’re going to keep using “on track,” I’m going to need substantially looser criteria.

Preferably something along the lines of moving forward, paying attention, and reserving the right to reroute.

That I can do.

The rest?

Ask me after graduation.